Not-common-enough code optimisations

We’re all warned against premature code optimisation, and that’s fair. Optimising too early can make the code more complex and hard to maintain without any evidence as to whether it actually makes it faster. A lot of the time it
really is better just to write the code and worry about optimisation when/if speed becomes an issue.

On the other hand all programmers ought to understand the concepts behind Big-O notation and algorithmic complexity. Applying these concepts to your code can actually help make it both more simple and faster at the same time. It may mean
not going with the first solution you think of, but once you’ve got the concepts worked out, making these simple changes to your coding style will allow you to reap huge benefits.

Date and time

11:30–11:55, Tuesday 29th January 2008, LinuxChix miniconf

Speaker biography

Jacinta Richardson is the training coordinator and director of Perl Training Australia, where she organises courses and maintains the training materials. Jacinta has been programming for over 10 years and has seen many examples of poorly designed code causing programs to run slowly. When not at work, Jacinta volunteers her in helping answering questions in various forums, participates in organising conferences such as the Open Source Developers’ Conference and linux.conf.au, and joins committees for various organisations such as SAGE-AU. Sometimes she goes scuba diving.